Would the 'Real' Jesus Christ Please Stand Up?

Last week, I spoke of the many different perspectives on Jesus that we can find in the early Church. In particular, I described our four canonical Evangelists and how each of them present us with a very different answer to the question, who do you say Jesus is? This week, I will embark on journey further back, past the Gospel accounts and attempt to reconstruct what we can know about the historical Jesus. This venture will probably take us some weeks to complete, since the subject is a complex and multifaceted one.

Today, I'd like to begin by addressing the issue of method. In effect, we will be asking questions about how Biblical scholars like me undertake the task of reconstructing the Historical Jesus. What criteria do we use to sort fact from fiction?

Setting the Parameters

To state our objective succinctly, the task before us is to uncover the 'Jesus of History'. What do we mean by that title? Scholars distinguish between the 'Jesus of History' and the 'Christ of Faith' (Martin Kahler 1964); that is, between, on the one hand, the Christ proclaimed by the later Church in Gospel stories, liturgical celebrations, dogmatic statements and theological speculations, and, on the other hand, the 'Earthly' Jesus who walked and talked his way around the Galilean country side onto a cross in Judea.

However, it is important to note that if the 'Christ of Faith' is to have any validity it must be based on the 'Jesus of history'. Christianity is a historical religion with its roots deep within the soil of a real historical past.

Reconstruction of a typical male at the time of Jesus made from forensive evidence for a BBC Television program. It was made to give us a better understanding of what Jesus may have looked like based on empirical evidence rather than the imagination of artists — which is wheree we get most of our "pictures" of the real Jesus from.

The Jesus of history is important, but it must also be said that this 'Jesus' is a modern theoretical reconstruction, which is both tentative and fragmentary. We should not confuse the Jesus of history with 'real Jesus' — a person who can never be completely recovered by us who are separated from that person by time and space. Still, it is worth remembering that unlike any other historical figure we have a huge database of secondary sources of information from which to build up a sufficiently accurate picture. We could compare our endeavour here to that of another historian trying to reconstruct the historical Socrates, for which the only source is Plato.

As Biblical scholars we are blest with a wealth of material, primarily drawn from the Gospels. The problem is that these texts are infused with the post-Easter faith of the early Church. They are written some thirty and more years after the Christ event. They are written in Greek for Greek speaking second- and third-generation Christians, not for the Aramaic-speaking Jewish followers of Jesus. Not one single text can be reliably attributed to the hand of any of the original disciples of Jesus. Finally, as we saw last week, the four Gospels offer very different interpretations of the Christ event.

The Five Criteria for Historicity

The problem that confronts the modern Biblical scholar is how can we distinguish between the original event or saying and the later interpretation. How can we distinguish between 'tradition' and 'redaction'? The term tradition here is taken to mean a genuine reminiscence from the ministry of Jesus. Redaction means the later additions, interpretations and augmentations made by either the final editor (redactor) or previous tradents of the Jesus materials (cf. Lk 1:1-4).

Over the last couple of centuries, since the advent of modern Biblical scholarship, we have developed five criteria for judging the historical truth or worth of individual pieces of information (sayings, stories, or events) found in the Gospels. These criteria have been used to great effect by the now famous Jesus Seminar a coalition of Biblical scholars who have met to vote on which aspects of the Gospels are likely to be true. Like the Fellows of the Jesus Seminar, we too can apply these criteria to the Gospels in an attempt to build up a reliable picture of who Jesus was, what he did, and what he said.

• 	Fragment from the Fourth Gospel, John Rylands Library of Manchester

  Embarrassment. Our first criterion is the "embarrassment", by which we mean that a particular story or saying would not have been invented by the later Church if it would prove embarrassing for their picture of Jesus (the Christ of Faith). One example of this is the Fourth Gospel, which provides conflicting information about Jesus baptising (Jn 3:22; 4:1-2). To present Jesus as a baptiser would seem to tie Jesus far too closely to John the Baptist, a problem with which the early Church seemed to have struggled constantly. We might also cite the story of the Syrophoenician woman (Mk 7:24-30), which has Jesus bested in an argument with a Gentile woman. Another might be the saying in Mark that seems to suggest that Jesus admitted having no knowledge about the timing and date of the eschaton (Mk 13:32).
• Discontinuity or dissimilarity. Next we use the criterion of discontinuity, by which we mean that something that Jesus said or did cannot be explained by appealing to either Judaism before him or earliest Christianity after his death and resurrection. Here, for instance, we might cite some of the most strikingly characteristics of Jesus of Jesus' message and mission: his use of the children's term 'Abba' for God the Father (Mk 14:36; Rom 8:15; Gal 4:6); his use of parables; his choice of Twelve disciples destined to be "judges' over the Twelve tribes of Israel (Lk 22:30) in the new world order.
• Multiple Attestations. It is generally considered that any event, saying, or person who appears in two or more independent sources presents us with an excellent case for historically reliability. So, for example, the Lord's supper (Mk 14:12-26 and 1 Cor 11:17-34), Jesus' death on the cross, Peter as the first apostolic recipient of a post-Resurrection Christophany (1 Cor 15:5; Lk 24:34), and the presence of women at the cross and at the empty tomb, are all likely to be historical.
• Coherence or Consistency. This criterion follows the idea that a saying or deed of Jesus must adhere with other aspects of Jesus' program – that is, they must 'fit' with Jesus' basic message. Scholars generally agree that Jesus preached an 'eschatological' message (more about that in a future article) that looked forward to the coming of the reign of God on earth, which would usher in a new world order. So the message of the Beatitudes (which speak of turning the present world order on its head), Jesus' concern for the poor and outcast and the dominical prayer, the 'Our Father', with its highly charged apocalyptic overtones all 'fit' well into Jesus basic program.
• Rejection and Execution of Jesus (something that might explain why Jesus died). With this final criterion, we judge reported actions and teachings attributed to Jesus in terms of how they might explain Jesus' arrest and execution. Why Jesus was killed? Surely he must have said or done something that brought him into the firing line of the powerbrokers of his day. Hence, things such as Jesus' Temple Act and his consistent attack on the power of the priestly elite demonstrate that Jesus was not a simple healer or spinner of wise aphorisms. Incidents where Jesus seems to have challenged the powers of the day are likely to be historical.

The Greatest Story Ever Told

Jesus is and was an enigma. There is so much we do not know about him. And much of what we have about him in our Gospel stories has been reworked and edited in the light of the Easter event, which profoundly and irrevocably altered the prevailing views on Jesus, the man. Moreover, as his story was retold and subsequently repackaged for audiences around the Mediterranean, Jesus' story was augmented and inflated in the interests of the various target audiences. These stories inevitably contributed to the "Christ of Faith", but that figure of devotion has its roots in the "Jesus of History".

Christianity is a historical religion that takes seriously the belief that God acts in history. It is important for us even today to seek to travel back in time via the historical enterprise to uncover the very foundations of our faith that reside in the Historical Jesus.

Further food for the journey:
R. N. Longenecker, "The Jesus of History and the Christ of Faith: Some Contemporary Reflections" Yorkminster Park Theological Forum. Yorkminster Park Baptist Church, Toronto. February 11, 1999.
URL: www.mcmaster.ca/mjtm/2-51.htm

"The Jesus Seminar" Weststar Institute.
URL: www.westarinstitute.org/Jesus_Seminar/jesus_seminar.html

"The Historical Jesus" The New Testament Gateway.
URL: www.ntgateway.com/Jesus/

Ian Elmer is a lecturer in New Testament at ACU National (formally Australian Catholic University). He is also a member of the Centre for Early Christian Studies, and was recently admitted into ACBA (Australian Catholic Biblical Association). His research specialities are Paul and First-Century Christianity. He is the author of published articles in the Australian Ejournal of Theology and in Prayer and Spirituality in the Early Church (a publication of the Centre for Early Christian Studies). He is currently completing a doctoral thesis, entitled Paul, Jerusalem and the Judaisers: The Galatian Crisis in its Broader Historical Context.

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©2006 Ian Elmer

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